River View With Cader Idris

Apart from such Italian subjects as the Museum’s other Wilson painting exhibited nearby, the artist’s British patrons sought landscapes of familiar topographies. Thus his work increasingly focused upon depicting specific British landscapes while unifying and enveloping them in the softened, idealized atmospheres derived from his study of Claude Lorrain. The result was a sensed intimacy and serenity to sites, ennobled yet familiar, that spoke to British identity and pride. The River View with Cader Idris presents a scene in northern Wales, with an aqueduct to the right, a castle in the distance and an angler in the foreground. The composition reveals the influence of the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Albert Cuyp. The name of the painting refers to the distant mountain.